Murphy, it turns out, was very much not the debonair gentleman thief as played by Don Stoud in Live a Little, Steal a Lot.
Jack Murphy, the handsome surfer-playboy jewel thief — that’s what Nora Ephron would have you think, anyway — died last week at age 83, from heart failure.
Murphy was born in LA but belongs to Florida. That’s where he made his mark as a surfer, winning the ’62 Daytona Championships and briefly running Murf’s Surf Shop in Indialantic.
And that’s where he began thieving professionally, as a B&E creeper in Miami Beach, stealing high-end art from rich people’s beach homes and selling the pieces back to their insurance companies.
In 1964, Murphy and two accomplices broke into the American Museum of Natural History in New York and stole the Star of India sapphire, plus a big handful of other precious gems, and “Jewel Heist of the Century” stories ran coast to coast.
Three days later they were caught, and Murphy served 21 months in Rikers.
My resentment against Jack Murphy began with the fact that his perfect “Murf the Surf” nickname sounded too much like “Murphy,” and I don’t want anybody or anything stepping that close to Rick Griffin’s sweet-faced cartoon grom, who represents all of our surfing innocence.
What really put me off Jack Murphy, though, was looking deeper into his criminal history while writing Encyclopedia of Surfing in 2000. Murphy, it turns out, was very much not the debonair gentleman thief as played by Don Stoud in Live a Little, Steal a Lot.
He was a stone-cold killer who in 1967 took a pair of female crime accomplices out for a boat ride, beat them to death, knifed opened their torsos, tied them to concrete blocks, and threw them overboard.
The East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame elected Murphy on their first ballot, in 1996, noting his competition wins and his surf shop.
The open-and-shut double-murder conviction somehow went unmentioned.
It shouldn’t matter, but Jack Murphy also looks like Montgomery Burns’ favorite son.
(Like Matt Warshaw’s flavour? This obit comes from his weekly mail-out, sent to all good surfers who cut three bucks a month to subscribe to his bottomless archive of surf history. Join here. And if you want a little more, listen to Matt, along with Tyler and Jamie Breuer on their Sunday Joint podcast here. Fascinating.)
I applaud Murphs MO
Don Stroud.
Not Stoud.
Matt is lovely but always had spelling problems.
He is not in any way connected with the Mongol races.
Were you Matt’s boss?
Must have felt AMAZING on that throne!!!!
Matt was my boss for a few years then he went off to further his edumacation at Berkeley.
But it was a lot of fun to work at Surfer during that time.
We were owned by a concrete magnate named Bud Fabian under For Better Living.
He left us alone to do whatever, so we did.
It’s gross that Surfer is now part of some Action Sports Group of some big corporate publisher.
Severson is spinning, and his wails rip the air.
He became so intelligent that he realized he had to quit surfing. Epiphany.
No he didn’t want to quit surfing, but he probably felt he should be doing more than writing about surfing.
And he was effected/influenced by a female, and that’s a dangerous road, always.
Matt kept surfing, he just wanted to find something better for his brain to do.
Like me, he descended from brainy. accomplished people and probably felt like he wasn’t living up to it.
Maybe.
Ask him.
We have, here, before, and he admitted as much. Nice man. Talented. Surfing and Typing. Last story was about quitting, which he recanted, but made JP Currie write about quitting. It was almost infectious how the notion spread.
The movement was coined “Quit Lit”.
You need to read more Benny. There’s a whole world out there for you to discover.
I only read my own stuff and usually just to do word counts and multiply by $3.00 a word.
No one else really interests me that much.
Dan Jenkins is good. Matt likes Dan Jenkins.
We bonded over that, and then I thought he was a dick.
Matt, that is.
In fact my brother is about to take a road trip so I sent him a story I did for Big Sky Journal about The Sacajawea Hotel in Three Forks, Montana.
A story that apparently every man, woman and horse in Montana has read.
This will sound like kvelling but sometimes I read my own stuff and think: “This guy is pretty good.”
Is that prideful? Pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Gotta be careful.
kvell
/k(ə)vel/ verb
INFORMAL•NORTH AMERICAN
gerund or present participle: kvelling
feel happy and proud.
“my mom was kvelling—bursting with pride”
DUde, you should submit that story to Chas… the motel in Montana story. Heard that there is a restaurant on a River that has the most bomb Fried Chicken in the region. Served with Biscuits and doctored mash potatoes… did you do a story on that?
We need some Food reviews around here to balance the shark stuff. Hey Derek, can I type a food review.
Like if you buy Hayden Shapes minimalist home, where do you take the wife to eat nearby? How about meeting the boys for a steak, close by? Discreet place to bump into your girlfriend? Cheap motel within an hour to bump into a Coffey Sister?
Montanans know how to eat.
Having worked on ranches I know how damned hungry you get after 8-10 hours of physical labor.
It’s almost as bad as surfing.
You need three solid meals a day when you are working like that.
I don’t know about the place on the river with the bomb fried chicken.
Montana has a lot of rivers. It’s the Mentawai for fly fishermen.
Maybe they should print the best shark recipes?
RIverhouse, Big Sky.
Smoked meats, Fried Chicken and beer.
Comeon.
xx
I’ve never been to Big Sky, for some reason, perhaps because a river doesn’t run through it?
I once was fishing in Yellowstone with George Nikitin – who took that epic photo of Perry Miller at Mavericks, at the dawn of the Tow Age – and an FBI agent named R_____ L_____ who I grilled mercilessly about a lot of things, and he told me some secrets of the world – about Saddam Hussein and WMD and suitcase nuclear weapons and how the second Gulf War was gonna go down – and he was right. I saw it all happen, as he predicted.
FBI Guy thought it was cool I knew and was name-dropping Brock Little and Greg Noll, and I thought it was cool he knew and was name-dropping Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice
Ike the Cat was with me on that fishing trip and – true to his nature – he jumped into the car of a stranger and fell asleep.
The car was driven by a lady whose real name – believe it or not – was Gidget.
Ike ended up in Ennis, Montana and I had to detour all the way to Gidget’s house.
Gidget’s boyfriend was a Montana he-man – kind of like Llewelyn Moss/Josh Brolin in No Country For Old Men – who thought I was some kind of California weirdo faggot for traveling with a cat.
I didn’t try to tell him the cat was a present from Greg Noll and we had gone to Alaska and etc. etc
He wouldn’t have understood or cared.
That guy worked in Big Sky apparently.
I’m sure the River House is epic.
Montana takes its meat as seriously as Brazil and Australia. And Texas.
(This below is that George Nikitin photo of Perry Miller using the wrong board and the wrong ski and taking off in the wrong spot and doing everything wrong at Mavericks. But he survived.
This was around 1998 and even with all that has happened there and everywhere since, that is a moose of a wave.
Doug Hansen was driving. He used to nightsurf Rivermouth a lot.
Oddly and coincidentally, Nikitin emailed me last night about Murph the Surf. He said:
You won’t believe my encounter with Murph the Surf in the back of a van, enroute to the World Series in Oakland for UPI….
About to eat dinner, will tell you about it after dinner.
Surreal
He was really nice around the time when we were on the same team with UPI.
He did a lot of work with people on death row.
He really did change his way ultimately.
But his BS rap was still loud and clear)
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Is that a dead wail buried at Trestles?
Wow did anyone else catch this?
Probably not, because you’re all a buncha dullards who wouldn’t know DB Cooper if he jumped into bed with you.
DB Cooper was described as “a middle-aged man” and Murph was 37 in 1971. Was Murph in the slammer in 1971? I’ll look.
Probably not the same dude, but dayum!
That’s the kind of heist a surfer might attempt.
Didn’t you see the new Point Break?
There’s a character in Malibu Fire who is based on Murph the Surf and Miki Dora.
I call the character “Dickie Remoura” and he’s a famous surfer who went into prison in 1970 at 20 years old and just got out.
He’s 70 years old, been in prison for 50 years and now he’s out and living in Malibu.
Still wants to surf. I see whatshisname playing him.
The dude married to Katharine Ross.
Sam Elliott. He’d be great as Dickie Remoura.
Wouldn’t that be something?
Dickie Remoura would be a fun character to write: Rip van Winkle in the 21st Century.
Is there still a reward for DB Cooper? I mighta just cracked it.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c… https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
He didn’t have the jump experience. D.B. was a C_A asset, and it was an actual training exercise. But the boogey man/thief stories are always better.
C.I.A asset? You sure?
And Murph was in prison in 1971, for those murders.
Still….
The weather in Ireland is conducive to Day Time Drinkin’
Sounds gnarly but if you don’t cut a body open before ditching it overboard.. it’ll float back to the surface. Just ask Roger Rogerson.
Sounds oddly experienced WP. You got any confessions you wanna share with us?
Too many CB, too many.
He murdered two girls and was paroled nearly twenty years before his original parole date to the horrors of those girls’ families because he ‘found god’. Oh he ‘gave his life to god’ – fuck that imaginary bullshit. He was a shit human and he should rot in hell for what he did to those girls and their families. He should have never been let out of prison.
You may be right, maybe he should have served the full term, but people do change and God can, and does change people from the inside out. He did go on to visit almost 2000 prisons sharing his new faith, and was never in trouble again.
He killed two women in cold blood.
People should be executed for that.
Florida has no qualms about the death penalty.
Maybe the jury liked his cutback?
He killed two women and dumped them overboard.
Would God forgive that?
No.
Yeah, sometimes you cant rehab people. Murders were gruesome.
Now if he had been black, the arriving officers would have shot him dead and saved the state a lot of money.
Rehab or repentance or not. You murder two people, you’re history.
You don’t get the chance to rehab.
The world is overpopulated anyway, start with murderers.
If those two women had been your friends, daughters, wives, girlfriends, would you want that guy walking around free?
Nope.
Nope.
Matt and I used to argue capital punishment as a matter of fact.
He was dead-set against it at one time, and as liberal as I am, I was certain there were certain behaviors that deserved the death sentence.
Life in prison is a different kind of punishment, but the ignominy of being executed is probably satisfying to the aggrieved.
Closure and all that.
I believe in second chances, even third. But two crimes are not redeemable. Murder and Pedo. You can’t rehab a Pedo. Murph murdered two brutally that we know of. Even the sky fairy isn’t going to make him a good guy. His victims had no second chance.
Murder and pedo. Yep. My thoughts exactly.
Taking advantage of elderly people? Maybe.
Singing Escape (The Pina Colada Song) at karaoke?
Saying “Cali” when you mean California?
Wearing a MAGA hat?
I hate those reverse mortgage commercials on TV… fucking grifters scamming grandma. We need to revere the elderly more as a society so that I can continue to grow old.
What about singing ‘Tequila’ at karaoke? Slippery slope. But yeah anyone that says Cali needs to go the fuck back to Tucson.
You gotta problem? Tequila is one of the all-time party songs.
Right up there with Louie Louie.
And one of the all-time great saxophone songs, for that matter, if that’s your axe.
(But yes, anyone who says “Cali” should go back to Tucson, or farther)
In the Terry Tubesteak Tracy interview for The Surfer’s Journal the last question and answer went like this:
Tubesteak is nearly 70 and his feet bug him, but he intends
to be around for a while.
Sometime in the next couple of decades, he will be strolling up the golden stairs to heaven, and he has very high expectations for what he hopes will greet him.
BEN
What is the music you hear at the gate?
TUBESTEAK
“Louie, Louie,” because in my experience, when you
walk into a party and they’re playing “Louie, Louie,”
that is going to be a good party.
BEN
Will Dora be there?
TUBESTEAK
Hope so.
BEN
What else do you hope to find?
TUBESTEAK
That’s easy: Tube’s Steak and Lobster House.
Funny you brought that up, yes, there is a very good chance Dora will be there.
Shortly before Dora passed away, Dora called up Louis Zamperini, (they made a movie about Zamprrini, “Unbroken” a few years back), Zamperini is a born again Christian, so Dora called him, and “thanked him” for being such a “good influence” on him shortly before he passed away. –It’s in Resin’s book about Dora
I forget Zamprini’s exact quote, but something to the effect, when someone is dying, that’s when their true colors come out, and how much the call meant to him, and he believed he would see Miki in Heaven.
Now Mr. Commenter, I have seen the error of my of ways. Califia it is..Used to be the Golden State. Its a state of mind. Its a State of Burnt.
Add fire starters to that list.
I was doing a 330am run home from Ojai, back roads 1995 and the cops stopped me, asked me what are you doing out here.?
Someone was out there starting fires they said, that isnt you is it? I said “firestarters should be shot”…they liked that, and somehow didnt find the other dumb shit I was doing, and just sent me home. Close call that was..I almost believed in guardian angels. Just dumb luck.
Leaving at 600am is better, with boards or fishing poles on th eroof as you are obviously an early riser, doing the dawn patrol.
Yep, arsonists should be shot.
America has become waaaaay too tolerant and lenient.
People commit murders and get five years in prison, it’s lame.
Or they aren’t tried at all, as we just saw in Kentucky.
That dude who shot the two deputies in Los Angeles better hope he doesn’t get caught, because he’s going away for life.
I would have no problem with him being executed for that. Unfortunately, every year people get light sentences for horrific crimes. Bad judges, bad court systems, I don’t know.
But, yes, if someone was ‘truly repentant’, realized what they had done and how grossly wrong it was, and “truly” from their heart felt convicted of it, and ‘truly sorry’ for what they had done, and came before God (and the son of God), and asked to be forgiven in ‘true repentance’–yes, God would forgive him.
That being said, that does not excuse them from still being held accountable for their crime (sin) in the sight of the law, and they may still have to do jail time, or even life in prison in some cases, and still have to live with other consequences for their crime.
But, yes, Jesus would forgive the ‘truley repentant’, that’s why He died on the cross, so we could have a way to be forgiven, but it is not automatic, you have to ‘realize’ you’ve sinned, (we all have), and ‘repent’ (truly), and God will forgive you.
Its the best news ever!
The sky fairy works in mysterious ways….
Yeah – he found God – so what? That means nothing to many of us and frankly means zilch to me. He gutted two girls. If that were my daughter and they let him out, I would have hunted his ass down. He could have ministered just fine behind bars where he belonged.
Beware, ladies of pervy dudes offering boat rides! A couple of Marblehead lobstermen I know told me about their friend that found this poor woman and the radio squabble that went out that day. Kind of ruined my taste for lobster.
https://apnews.com/86c35df4…
This happened in the Tampa Bay area when I was still in HS – https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… – pretty gnarly
What you’re from Florida?
They let Florida people comment on a surfing website?
I want my money back.
Florida.
If Florida‘s so smart, why is it in Florida?
It’s Flori-duh. They let kooks like you post here, so why not Flori-duh?
Jewish people. Too bookoo.
He looks like Donald Dumps long lost third son.
Thievery and murder? Never mind the hall of fame- If his crimes were more current he probably would have been a politician. Governor at least.
David lee Scales covered this guy a couple of episodes ago.
https://surfsplendorpodcast…
Irish men , seem to be of two types , drop dead gorgeous , or just plain ugly …. ?
Or just plain drunks or heavy drinkers
They like to go out 8 nights a week !
How easy was it
Before CCTV and
DNA testing?
I used to think about how easy it would have been to be a smuggler…….before the x-ray machines and computerised passport control. Surely it would have been a piece of cake – if you were that way inclined. Please feel free to share any personal experiences. I enjoy a good read.
I smuggled some little balls of squishy black hash in a bag of candy. Wrapped in cling film then coated in chocolate.
Good times.
You rebel ….my mate bought fireworks in France , then stuck them in my bag , instead of his , on the flight home …… luckily it was the last decade of Laissez-Faire international travel .
I wonder if Craig Lawley has any experiences of smuggling stuff that he might share with us from his Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G, an AT&T 5G smartphone?
With a phone from Samsung he might be the new Mr Asia … ?
Poor wee Craig Lawley
“Who are you?” was his catchphrase
We mourn his absence
~(With yet even more apologies to EH)
Craig should go !
His stay was brief. Rest in power Craigos
Craig would Go !
Announcing The Samsung Galaxy …. Big Wave ( Goodbye ) in memory of Craig .
In 1987 when I was 12 I flew from Tennessee to L.A. with $60 bucks (a lot then), of fireworks. Not sparklers but M-80s, big bottle rockets, mortars, etc.
SWIM used to compress approximately 2 oz of high grade California bud- Bullryder, Durban Poison, Jack Herer and Kush (when it was just “Kush”) and neatly affix it to his underwear waistband or wear tighty whiteys and make it look like he was John Holmes. Flew to the east coast and Hawaii dozens of times with no problems and once got a full pat down.
No more Dora the Explorer counterfeiting his own airline tickets these days ….
Interesting story this one – good for a road trip
Murders at Whiskey Creek – We follow world champion surfer Jack Roland Murphy as he pulls off the biggest jewel heist in American history. Things turn deadly as he is implicated in two murders afterwards. Interviews with him and his accomplices expose even more murders, and an even darker story.
https://podcasts.apple.com/…